The median price of a metro Phoenix home climbed 34 percent in 2012. The rapid rise in home prices over the past 12 months means that many homeowners have regained more than one-half of the value their houses lost during the crash.

At the end of last year, the region’s median home price was $164,000, compared with $122,500 the year before.

Home prices climbed last year for two key reasons: Homes resold by lenders typically sell for lower prices, and foreclosures plummeted 51 percent in 2012 compared with 2011. Also, the supply of houses on the market fell 6 percent, according to a report released Thursday by Arizona State University’s W. P. Carey School of Business.

“Foreclosures and short sales have gone down, eliminating the sources of many cheap homes, so the more expensive types of transactions, like normal resales and new-home sales, went up,” said Mike Orr, director of the Center for Real Estate Theory and Practice at ASU.

Fewer houses on the market also translated to a 12 percent decline in home sales for the year. Approximately 8,000 houses changed hands in metro Phoenix during 2012.

Orr said the number of homes on the market started to climb late in the year, but prospective buyers appear more reluctant.

“We still see multiple bids for many resale listings, but demand isn’t as strong as it was in spring 2012,” Orr said.

Investor home purchases in the Phoenix area began to decline in the fall, Orr said. Overall, about 36 percent of all home sales were cash deals last year. Early in 2012, cash deals made up more than 50 percent of all transactions.

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